Wired iPad App Sells 24,000 Copies in First 24 Hours

Wired magazine sold 24,000 copies of its iPad app in the first 24 hours it was available in Apple’s iTunes store, company executives said. The app was released shortly after midnight Tuesday.

It’s difficult to put that number in context, because there aren’t many iPad magazine apps yet, these being the earliest days of the new platform for which publishers have high hopes but little track record to parse.

The real test for Wired magazine (and everyone else) will be to continue to meet high reader expectations once any novelty aspect wears off, and to come up with a subscription model as quickly as possible. So far every publisher has to sell magazines as individual copies, but they often choose to charge the same cover price as the print edition.

Wired is no exception: Its app costs the same $5 as its single-copy U.S. print price, a bargain only for overseas readers who sometimes pay $14 for a single copy (thank you, Øivind Idsø of Norway) and, in most of the world, $6 per edition even as subscribers.

In press briefings before they released their app, Wired and Condé Nast executives emphasized that more and better features would be rolled out in the immediate coming months — including the leveraging of iPad functionality not tapped in the June issue — as part of a continuing R&D process.

Wired.com and Wired magazine are both owned by Condé Nast but have separate editorial and business operations.